I Wasnt One Of The Six Million - Analysis

A life claimed as one’s own, then seized by history

The poem’s central insistence is that a single person’s life is both intimately self-owned and inescapably drafted into collective time. Amichai begins by staking out the body as private territory: My life is the gardener of my body. But he ends with a vision of millions of strangers directing one another at crossroads, repeating There, over there with the fervor of ritual. Between those poles, the speaker keeps asking the same question in different costumes: what can a human lifespan mean when it is pressed between the enormous numbers of Jewish history and the impersonal vastness of the universe?

The body as landscaped fate: control, warning signs, and wildness

The opening sequence turns anatomy into a chain of gardens, and each garden carries a different fantasy of control. The brain is a hothouse closed tight, packed with exotic life and fear—its plants have terror of becoming extinct, as if thought itself were a threatened species. The face becomes a formal French garden with marble paths and statues, a public façade meant to look composed, complete with the harsh signage of etiquette: Keep Off and Don’t Pick the Flowers. Above the navel, an English park pretends to be natural and free, yet it is still humanlike, in our image, suggesting that even “nature” is curated self-portraiture.

Then the poem dips under the navel into what the speaker can’t fully govern: the lower body is sometimes a nature preserve that is also an unpreserved preserve, both protected and uncontainable. The sudden bluntness of penis and testes as smooth polished stones makes desire feel geological—ancient, dense, mute—with dark vegetation between them, a reminder that sexuality is not only tenderness but also thicket. Even inheritance becomes animal: the father’s teachings and the mother’s commandments are not ideas but birds of chirp and song. The tone here is sensuous and wry, proud of the body’s variety, yet already haunted by rules, boundaries, and the fear of erasure.

Counting what can be counted: time as a private cosmos

In the second movement the speaker denies grand, abstract belonging—I have no share in the infinity of light-years—and replaces it with something stubbornly personal: the darkness is mine, and the light. The shift is from cosmic scale to tactile proof. The “infinite” becomes intimate: the grains of sand on the shore are the same sand where he made love in Achziv and Caesarea. This is a characteristic Amichai move: metaphysical questions are answered with geography and skin.

Yet the counting becomes obsessive: he breaks years into hours, then minutes, seconds, even fractions of seconds. The speaker wants a mathematics that belongs to him, because history’s mathematics—six million, six hundred thousand—will arrive later and dwarf him. So he invents another infinity: These, only these, / are the stars above me / that cannot be numbered. The contradiction is poignant: he rejects cosmic immeasurability, then recreates it inside the ticking subdivisions of his own time.

The hinge: from Exodus drama to the stark mantra Open closed open

A clear turn comes when the poem tests its metaphors for lifespan. First it reaches for the biblical maximum: I’m like a man gone out of Egypt, the Red Sea splitting into two walls of water, with Pharaoh’s army behind and desert ahead, perhaps the Promised Land. The life span is rendered as emergency passage—escape, pursuit, uncertainty—already hinting at later images of emergency exits. But the poem then strips that grandeur down to a stark, almost childlike refrain: Open closed open.

That mantra compresses existence into a three-part motion. Before birth, the universe is open without us; while living, everything is closed within us; in death, it is open again. The tone becomes cool, declarative, nearly liturgical. And the tension sharpens: the earlier gardens suggested spaciousness and variety inside the body, but now the body is described as closure itself, a kind of lockbox. Life is not expansion but enclosure—an interval in which the universe is temporarily sealed into a single person.

The self-portrait that sounds like execution

The fifth section makes the enclosure audible. A lifespan is like taking a timed photograph: he sets the camera on something stable (a word he undercuts with parenthetical irony), then runs, presses the timer, runs back, and listens to the ticking of time. The similes turn ordinary mechanics into judgment: the whirring is like a distant prayer, but the shutter’s click is like an execution. The poem’s spirituality here is not comfort; it is procedure.

Even God’s role is not merciful narrator but technician: God develops the picture / in His big darkroom. The finished image is brutally specific: white hair, eyes tired and heavy, and eyebrows like the charred lintels of a burned house. That “burned down” house is not only personal aging; it quietly anticipates the fire and smoke of the Shoah in the next section. The self-portrait becomes a prophecy: the face carries scorch marks from a larger conflagration.

Not among the numbers, yet still carrying fire and smoke

The title’s claim finally arrives as an ethical and psychological knot: I wasn’t one of the six million, not even among the survivors. Nor was he among the six hundred thousand of Exodus; he came to the land by sea. The speaker is excluded from the two defining crowds—biblical redemption and modern catastrophe—yet he refuses the comfort of distance. He still has the fire and the smoke within me, transposed into the Exodus language of pillars of fire and pillars of smoke that guide by night and day. Guidance becomes trauma’s afterimage: what once led a people now leads a single anxious body.

That anxiety is rendered physically: a mad search for emergency exits, for soft places, for escape into weakness and hope. Even the biblical miracle of water from rock becomes a portrait of desperate prayer and violence: quiet talk to the rock or frenzied blows. The poem’s contradiction is at full force here: the speaker denies membership in the defining events, but his inner life is organized by their symbols and reflexes. History, he says, grind[s] me between them like two grindstones, reducing the self to powder—not by what he lived through, but by what lives through him.

A sharpened question: what if direction itself is the new faith?

After silence: no questions, no answers, the poem ends by watching humanity give directions with excited voices, as if pointing could replace revelation. If the old pillars of fire and smoke once told people where to go, now strangers at intersections perform that guidance as some ancient rite. Is the poem suggesting that, after catastrophe and after exhausted belief, our remaining religion is simply the need to keep moving—choosing a second turnoff instead of the first, insisting on the other there?

The final tone: faith without a destination

The closing repetition, I believe with perfect faith, sounds at first like creed, but it’s a creed about logistics, not salvation: oak trees, white houses, left or right. The poem’s ending is both tender and unsettling. It honors the human impulse to help one another navigate, yet it also hints that modern certainty has shrunk to mere orientation. Against six million dead and six hundred thousand redeemed, against open-closed-open existence, the speaker’s faith lands on a small, communal act: not meaning, but direction—kept alive by the voice that says, again, There, over there.